I'm practicing application of Schema.org. Anyone who's browsed the documentation there knows that there's a lot of need for improvement for more clear understandings on use for each property.

My question on this post is more about the significantLinks property and how it effects SEO for on page, in content anchored text.

Does anyone have any more information regarding whether it's good to use for link optimization? I understand what Schema.org means that it's to be used on "non-navigational links" and those links should be relevant to the current page's meaning. But will using this property hurt SEO or make SEO better for each page?

I agree that it doesn't explain what search engines will do with that data, but that's the point. Schema.org does not specify how things will look in search results: they only specify what something means, and leave it up to search engines to implement ways to display that data in a meaningful way.

Does google do anything with this, though? No, google has not completely implemented schema.org in their search results, and they don't have to. Here's the list of google supported schema.org specifications:

Google supports rich snippets for these content types:

Reviews

People

Products

Businesses and organizations

Recipes

Events

Music

Google also recognizes markup for video content and uses it to improve
our search results.

I don't see anything there about significantLink or significantLinks, so I'm going to conclude that google does nothing with it.

However, I don't think that google is going to implement this. This feature could easily be abused by people wanting certain pages to rank higher than others, even if they aren't relevant to the search query. If Google implemented this, it would destroy their user's search experience, and that's something I can't see google doing.

As of right now, schema.org microformats are primarily used to display purposes in search results. So far there has not been any indication that they affect search results in any significant way. Plus with that particular format being easy to abuse i would suspect it would have no effect on rankings. I would speculate it will serve other purposes somehow related to the display of search results.

I understand that Rich Snippets require usage of microdata, and Rich Snippets are for search result display. However, last year, the major search engines all agreed on microdata to help with the accuracy of search queries. From my understanding it is entirely beneficial to define each page of a website with the type of business it is. As far as "significantLinks" I'm looking for more information for the use of this property. Schema.org is very limited on descriptions.
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hdavis84Jul 1 '12 at 18:29

Schema.org brought about a revolutionary collaboration between the
world’s top search engines to create a method that made it easier to
categorize and identify important information on websites. However,
local businesses are largely behind when it comes to adopting current
web design and SEO practices.

Geographic Markup

Making sure a business’ geographic and contact information is listed
correctly on their website should be the first step when it comes to
implementing schema onto a website. The Local Business section of
Schema.org has a variety of categories that businesses can implement
as part of the footer or contact page of their website, including
address, phone, fax, operating hours, and even accepted payment types.

The schema markup is displayed via div tags and isn’t displayed on the
live version of the website. The div tags designate the information
that applies to the chosen schema markup:

In this example for an Attorney’s office, the only information that is
displayed on the public-facing side of the website is the information
between the span and div tags. Visitors won’t be able to tell that a
business is using schema unless they view the source code of the
website.

The ‘itemprop’ in the span tag identifies the schema markup property
for that piece of information. All available properties are shown on
Schema.org in their applicable category. we did it in our gemstone
site and we found it more worth it.